I recently installed a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. All is well, until I install Lightroom again. (All files/programs were erased due to my OS upgrade at the same time).

(When I made the back up I simply copied and pasted them from my original Lightroom catalog). Bad idea. I load my backed up images into Lightroom, and discover, to my horror, that my 3500 images don't have any keywords. I tried everything, but the keywords are indeed gone. It wasn't all bad though. It gave me a chance to properly look through all my images, and throw away a lot of them, but it still sucked to manually type in keywords for 2000+ images.

My question is this: How should I make sure that I won't loose my keywords the next time I install Lightroom all over again? Since I'll be replacing my hard drive, I'll need to transfer the images WITH my keywords. That's the important thing. I don't want to end up loosing them all over again. Any suggestions?

LR's database is kept in the Lightroom folder in your catalog. I have mine set to backup every week (it creates a small database backup in the same folder), and then I manually copy everything to another drive.

I would presume the keywords are either saved to the file (EXIF?), kept in an XMP sidecart file, or stored into lightrooms database.

_________________I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".